On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 6:35 AM, White, Jason J <jjwhite@ets.org> wrote: > This discussion has been informative, but it motivates a call for > clarification of the semantic differences between the proposed aria-current > state, aria-selected and aria-activedescendant. As I understand the > differences: > > aria-activedescendant implies that the element has the keyboard focus. > No, this isn't necessarily true at all. Suppose you have a listbox with 10 choices. The 5th one is highlighted. If the listbox itself is focused, then the active descendant tells you that the 5th item is the one that's active and is the focused item within the focused control. However, if focus leaves the listbox, the 5th item may still be highlighted; it's still the active item within the list and it's where focus would go if you focused the listbox again. For that reason, I'm leaning towards calling this proposed new attribute aria-active. It indicates that an item within a group is the active one, whether or not it currently has focus or not. It tells you something about what happens when the control does have focus. In the case of the listbox, if it's a single-select listbox then perhaps "active" and "selected" mean the same thing. But if it's a multi-select listbox, only one can be active but many can be selected.
Received on Thursday, 20 November 2014 16:26:08 UTC